After some discussion on IRC it was found out that the CDPATH environment variable was set which causes "cd debian/$pkg" to write the directory name to stdout which was then picked up by "xargs rm".(Thanks to Jakub Wilk.) This could be worked around by always using "cd whatever >/dev/null",
Better work-around is using "cd ./whatever", so that CDPATH is not taken into account at all.
-- Jakub Wilk
